From time to time, I (mis)translate poems from languages which I don’t speak, or at least, which I don’t speak well. I don’t claim that there’s any great artistic merit in this, but I enjoy doing it and there is some degree of effort, I promise. Anyhow, here’s the latest one.
Patrizia Cavalli is an Italian poet whose selected poems translates approximately as My Poems Won’t Change the World. I suspect neither will this (mis)translation. Nevertheless, her modesty is less appropriate than mine. Her poems are excellent and should be read by everyone.
I’m in this anthology, the distilled essence of Coventry’s legendary Fire and Dust poetry nights.
I wouldn’t claim to have been the most regular attendee at their monthly events. Working full-time as a lecturer tends to get in the way of a rich and fulfilling social life, especially during marking time!
But I always felt welcome there, as indeed does everyone who has read their work at Fire and Dust. Unlike some poetry groups, F+D always fostered a very open, supportive and warm environment. It is the opposite of elitist, in other words.
However, that doesn’t equate to lower standards. Every event they ever ran had an excellent contemporary poet headlining, and the open mic sessions were astonishing in the range of different voices, bewilderingly eclectic at times as this anthology indicates, but always engaging, intriguing, thought-provoking and passionate.
I never saw anyone bored at Fire and Dust, and it remains one of the things I miss about England. And it’s proven to be a real incubator of talent too, with some pretty big names cutting their teeth there over the past near-decade.
So if you ever wondered how good the quality of contemporary poetry in the English West Midlands is, you should simply pop along, virtually or in person (they do both online and meatspace events now). Failing that, buying this anthology is the next best thing!
I saw an old photograph of the road where my house is recently. It dated from sometime in the early 20th century, and featured a horsedrawn hearse with four formally-dressed funeral directors smoking while waiting outside a church for the funeral service to end. It captivated me, the life-in-death-in-life of it. Alas, I can no longer find it on the interwebs, but it evoked an era possibly contemporaneous with this one, from 1914.
Picture taken from a gallery posted online by BelfastLive.
Anyhow, it inspired a bit of verse, written for no good reason in an approximation of iambic pentameter.
Molloy and Malone, Magee and Muldoon
Molloy and Malone, Magee and Muldoon
Wait by the roadside, Tuesday afore noon,
Outside the wee redbrick church that was built
With money raised from parishioner guilt.
Magee and Muldoon, Molloy and Malone
Come from the New Lodge, the Ardoyne, the Bone
To bury, when time comes around at last,
The dearly departed of all North Belfast.
Muldoon and Molloy, Malone and Magee,
Smoking in black suits of conformity,
Won’t darken the door of the chapel at all.
They prefer the bar, or the grey snooker hall.
Malone and Magee, Muldoon and Molloy,
Scowl at the sunshine which they can’t enjoy.
Theirs is the burden and theirs is the curse
To hoist us on their shoulders and into the hearse
I have a guilty confession to make. I like tabloids. I used to write for them, quite a few of them in fact. I know a lot of people consider them to be low-rent, inaccurate, trashy or otherwise less than praiseworthy, but I’ve always thought they had a certain irreverent joie-de-vivre.
It’s quite difficult to write news for tabloids actually. Plenty of tabloid journalists have taken jobs with more ‘respectable’ (and poorer-selling) publications, but you rarely see anyone move in the opposite direction. Why? Because it’s actually a lot easier to write 1200 words of polysyllabic prose about a complex set of incidents than it is to summarise things in a succinct and pithy 400 words that a 12 year old could comprehend.
Anyhow, of course tabloids can also be egregious. Their sins are legion, and there’s no need to repeat them all here. But as a society, we get the media we deserve, a media which due to market forces inevitably reflects back our own collective interests and values. Hence it is no surprise that the readers of the UK’s Daily Mail reflect many of the opinions to be found within the paper’s articles.
In fact, one might reasonably argue that their own opinions often go much further into potential objectionability. This too has an entertainment and information value of its own. I often like to dip into the comments below Daily Mail articles to get a sense of how and what Middle England is currently fulminating about.
So it occurred to me one day, today in fact, that comments found below the Mail Online’s legendary ‘Sidebar of Shame’ might add up to an interesting found poem, a kind of meta-opinion from Middle England, a sort of universal reaction to the river of news which brings them to comment.
Every line below is a verbatim and genuine comment, but each is in response to a completely different story. Together it adds up to … well, like the Daily Mail readers, you be the judge.
From time to time, I busy myself (mis)translating poems from languages that I do not speak. Tonight it is eight below zero outside. I expect we will have the white here in Cappadocia tomorrow, if not quite the Christmas.
So, it seemed appropriate to share this mistranslation from the great Turkish modernist poet Sezai Karakoç.
Happy Christmas, or Yule, or whatever midwinter festival you prefer, to one and all.
Snow Poem (mis)translated from Sezai Karakoç
When you look and see that it is snowing You will understand the snow-gripped ground. And when you find a fistful of snow on the ground You will understand how snow can burn in snow.
When God rains down from the sky like snow, When the hot snow touches your hot, hot hair And when you bow your head, Then you will understand this poem of mine.
This man or that man comes and goes, And in your hands, my dream comes and goes. A vengeance comes and goes in each forgiveness. You will understand me when you understand this poem of mine.
Even the strange and murky currency of academic citation throws up pleasant surprises sometimes.
Academics are in some ways regulated by their accumulation of this fiat currency, the citation mill, which requires them to write for the best (ie allegedly most influential) journals, and then subsequently incite references to their work in similarly published articles by others.
There are even aggregators now, from Google Scholar to Scopus or Orcid, which exist to compile the magical measurable impacts which academic administrators and hiring committees so adore.
But citation need not be reduced to this quantitative measuring tool. It was created and intended as a mode of acknowledging the influence of ideas, attributing merit to the previous work of other scholars on whose shoulders, as Newton said, we stand.
It’s of course true that the citation mill is now regularly hacked and gamed by the more cynical academics, in ways ranging from the utterly immoral (like the citation rings discovered in some journals in recent years) to the merely dubious (such as scholars writing deliberately provocatively.) But like many things, just because the system is abused and mispurposed does not entirely eradicate its importance or validity.
No, knowledge is not (or should not be) a popularity contest. But democracy has shown us the weird benefits of being governed by the wisdom of crowds. And similarly, a lot of well-cited papers are well-cited because many people legitimately are influenced by their ideas.
But not all citation need be reduced to this number-crunching game. And for me as a kind of purist, the best form of citation is an acknowledgement or engagement with something I’ve said or written.
I was therefore very moved to read Dennis Wise’s excellent new article on the alliterative turn in 20th century American genre poetry. I should note that I am not an expert on either alliterative poetry or American genre poetry. But I HAVE read a lot of James Blish, and I was able to have a great discussion with Dennis about a James Blish poem he was looking at.
It’s the sort of thing academia ought to be about, and increasingly isn’t. Chatting to another scholar, trying ideas and theories out on one another in realtime, and eventually happening across an interpretation that seemed to account for both my knowledge and Dennis’s.
I didn’t expect to be thanked for it, so I value Dennis’s citation more than any other my work has received, precisely because it was a purist kind of citation. It won’t boost my Google Scholar rating in the eyes of the number crunchers. It won’t impress those who seek to measure knowledge quantitatively. But for me it is a succinct and generous example of what citation was meant to do.
Dennis has astutely identified something in US genre poetry that no one has really discussed before. His ideas are excellent and should change how we understand the history of alliterative poetry and its intersection with modernism, science fiction and 20th century American letters. It’s a genuinely great paper. I’m flattered to be associated with it in any way. I really enjoyed talking with Dennis about his ideas, and I’m glad he valued my thoughts.
If only more encounters in academia took the form of chatting with people like Dennis about their ideas, rather than answering to bean counters about dubious metrics, I’d be a happier academic. I’m going to go and thank more people in the credits of my next book now.
Happy World Poetry Day. Even in the stasis of global lockdowns, poetry still transports anyone to any time or place, real or imagined, should they only ask. This poem terminates at Lalibela, Ethiopia, sometime in early 2011.
Tej
The dancers shrug off the world. Everything that moves here
moves from the shoulders down. We drink tej and compare with
Fanta Orange. Then dance with the dancers, clumsy, white with brown.
A thousand years past, faith slammed into the rock and kept
slamming. Mountains bore churches. More people came and keep
coming, flecking the hills with fires, life seeking purchase.
We drink tej in the smoke-filled hall and clap to drums,
our sore legs throbbing. Round the fire, dancers shrug off the world.
We drink more tej. They beckon to us, brown shoulders bobbing.
